


in a little while, the sun comes low

by aosc



Category: Bleach
Genre: Gen, Pre-OT3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-13
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-06 13:58:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5419649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aosc/pseuds/aosc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Starrk thinks of sharing a throne room with a brash Arrancar youngster, and the half-human half-spirit abomination that would kill for him as a brother would.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in a little while, the sun comes low

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ser_Renity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ser_Renity/gifts).



> for @Ser_Renity, following a conversation about writing coyote starrk. i have no idea. this is crack. but like. serious!character study!crack. i don't even know, just go with it, y'all.

* * *

 

For a while, he sits slouched against a large crevice in the uppermost pillar of Las Noches' large statue. There is no place where the wind does not blow harshly and cold, where he can be, without risking injuring others. He doesn't terribly mind; the littlest Hollows, tiny whisks of spirits in the near-liquid forms of desert animals and chimera-type creatures, have no mind outside of devouring each other. Starrk figures that giving them the peace of mind that comes with obliteration isn't in the top ten of all cardinal sins. Even so, he typically avoids even the desert. He always has. Even as two.

 

Lilynette is sprawled half over the edge of the pillar, head tipped halfway down its long neck, legs punching holes through the thin air. Occasionally, she will lift her head to study him, brow knitted, mouth curved downwards in a bemused frown. "Starrk!" she'll bark, and, satisfied when he looks her way, she will let her head fall back once more, proceeding to ignore him.

 

It suits him just fine, to entertain the half of his soul by just  _being_. He has never desired anything else.

 

Of course, this was a long time ago, and now, when he looks up, searching her out, Lilynette isn't there. She is the punch in the air, ripping it up, the end of the line. He knows that she is him, his bones and the void in his soul. He thinks that perhaps, he was just lonely before her, alone with her, and now, with her gone, he would be what is considered a true  _Hollow_. There is a gouge in the very midst of all that he is -- and that is where she is supposed to be. But Lilynette is a fragment of the little memories in color he still has.

 

After a while, he gets up, circles the pillar. In every direction of weather, the moon is crescent, and a full bodied milk white. The sun never shines. Starrk sits down, once more, spine fitted into the crevice in the construction.

 

 

*

 

 

He notices something different only because somehow, the dry tape air tastes faintly of rain, one day. The sky is pale and grey, as always, but for just a second, something snaps and rumbles in the great distance, and on the wind, Starrk tastes the heady scent of something earthly.

 

He remembers through the disjointed memories of so many souls, rain. He thinks, for the width of a second, that one of those souls must be Lilynette's, but then he remembers that they used to be one, and now, he only remembers what is  _his_.

 

He remains seated.

 

 

*

 

 

And on the seventh day --

 

Sexta, young and brash, barrels into Las Noches for only the second time in the castle's history. Starrk feels his presence as easily as though he would have announced it by tearing the moon out of the sky. Of course, being who he is, he tears down half a pillar, and razes half a dozen rooms along the castle's outer wards. Out of spite or no, Starrk can't answer. He supposes that it doesn't truly matter. It never did matter, what reason they may have had, for doing what they did.

 

At first, he stays where he is. Keeping an eye on the ledge where Lilynette would have had her head tipped over, one foot resting across her other half bent knee, mouth perpetually sneering down below. He senses Grimmjow -- and someone else, someone he cannot identify, but it doesn't raise his curiosity as much as it merely passes his attention.

 

One afternoon, the bleak sunlight casts long shadows down into the ruins of the shortest pillar, and down below, he hears the dull murmur of words, of debris being moved, of Sexta's unmistakably loud voice.

 

He is young. Made out of a thousand upon a thousand young souls. Starrk has never seen the necessity in being brash and noisy, but then again, the other half of his soul was always perpetually loud. Somewhere, in the recesses of his old mind, he knows that being young entitles you to barrel through doors, and walls. To scream. To devour. Whether that is devouring souls, or memories, or moments, doesn't much matter.

 

Starrk remains seated on the pillar for three more days.

 

 

*

 

 

When he enters the throne room, light is spilling in spots and loops on the floor. Chunks of rock and debris are piling in the far end of the room. Starch white like mortal driftwood. Starrk hears the echo of voices and sees the wagging threads of their souls before he sees them.

 

"Oi, jackass, if you'd just listen to me -- "

 

"Don't ya ever stop yappin', Kurosaki? I said back the fuck off, I'm handlin' it."

 

"Like hell you are -- get over here."

 

"O - oi -- Quit that!"

 

Kurosaki. The Vizard. Starrk supposes that, biologically, he is somewhat an abomination. A chimera-type soul, sprouting a chipped bone mask beneath the human exterior. Then again, he isn't really in the business of judging. Not when he automatically looks down and to the left whenever a thought -- the sense of an emotion, overcomes him, and he twists to Lilynette to feel for her there, the round of a small shoulder at his hip, the one eye looking mischievously through a cast of eyelashes up at him.

 

Sexta is wrestling Kurosaki for an object he recognizes as something out of a once upon a time-event. The crown. Grimmjow is pressed to the human, leaning up against the curve of his back, reaching for the studded crown, perched atop Kurosaki's flat, upturned palms.

 

"The crown won't fit your head just because you would like for it to," Starrk says, and leans against a carving of pilaster, jutting out of the wall.

 

Kurosaki stutters to a halt, and twists his head whiplash quick. Grimmjow vaults back, vigilant. Both of them waste unnecessary amounts of energy just moving about the potential threat in vicinity, he notes.

 

"Starrk," Grimmjow says, almost wondersome, "How the hell'd you -- ?"

 

And how did he?

 

"Dying is -- quite difficult," he replies, and does not move from where he's parked himself. When he thinks about it, moving becomes, at times, too cumbersome. At least as one entity. One cog is turned forward merely by its attached piece of engineering. He can feel the ghostly touch of Lilynette kicking at his shin. Perhaps that's why he keeps coming up with the similes, ever ridiculous. 

 

Grimmjow nods, slowly. "Tch, yeah, go 'n figure," he says, and hesitates. Kurosaki -- The Vizard child, has sat the crown to balance delicate on the rest of the throne, and he's turned, a hand indicating towards reaching for a weapon, but he isn't hostile.

 

"Grimmjow -- " he warns, and if Starrk hadn't realized they were allied before, he certainly would have now. They move, symbiotic, the machinery.

 

Before Lilynette, he was lonely. With her,  _they_  were alone. After her, he figures that there is nothing across the spaces and worlds that would make him bother with -- much of anything. There is nothing to gain here, and he has nothing to lose. He is per definition, a free man. But he never desired to be. There is nothing about freedom that does not taste sour at the inception of his throat.

 

He gestures for the crown. "Sexta," he says, "The crown -- it isn't chosen. It chooses."

 

Kurosaki casts a quick eye towards the crown. An object as old as the dimension itself. Starrk knows, through all the souls forming the cavity in his chest, that it chooses, ancient in its picking. Spindly chips of bone crowd its top, and it is heavy, he feels it innately. As though if he were to think it hard enough -- not wish, per definition, a wish is something you desire; Starrk doesn't desire anything -- it would appear just above the crown of his head, and sink down slowly, slowly, until it would be able to root itself to his skull. Worm through his hair. Pierce his frontal lobe.

 

Grimmjow raises an eyebrow. Shrugs half a shoulder. "Who says I want it," he mutters.

 

Starrk hums. "Who says, that it is a better fit on someone who isn't you?"

 

"What?" Kurosaki says, frowning.

 

" _What_?" Grimmjow replies, pensive.

 

He looks to Starrk, as though they -- and this, is now his solemn duty. Starrk figures that he might as well duck out from beneath the pilaster. If not, Lilynette will nudge him out. It is their duty, somehow, the  _primera_  weighing on their joints and tendons, to see to this.

 

 

*

 

 

Starrk has never desired to rule.

 

It has never fit him, and it certainly did not fit  _them_. The thought of having the final decision weighing upon so many entities would make him shudder. No, it has never been in his interests to govern so many souls. It is enough, deciding what to do with each turn of the moon, to the sun, every day, with the one comprehensive  _one_  that he has. So when Grimmjow decides that, well, Hueco Mundo needs a king, Starrk lounges at the far back of the quarreling between him and Kurosaki.

 

Grimmjow puffs a breath, eyeing the crown pensively, and lowers it down towards his own head.

 

The crown hangs, suspended, mid-air.

 

Kurosaki refuses it, waving two hands in front of him when Grimmjow gets closer. He protests, "Don't come close to me with that --  _thing_ , Grimmjow."

 

And so, it juts, naturally, though unnaturally, a good inch over the utmost top of his skull, where he leaves it. Sexta grunts in annoyance for a third time, and attempts to force it down over Kurosaki's brow. "Don't be a child,  _Ich-i-go,_ " he sneers, and gives the crown a final shove. "Do it fer the good of the world; 's not like it'll choose you anyway."

 

It levitates.

 

Starrk is fascinated, detached, by its natural selection. He has no incentive to know how it works, but knowing that it does, is very interesting. He stands just at the edge of their little odd gathering, watches Kurosaki -- Ichigo, and Grimmjow bicker. It's good natured, though harsh, and Starrk intimately knows that connection. He sees the chasings of old ghosts in the way Ichigo brushes his knuckles over the arch of Grimmjow's hand, in the way that Sexta can bark his name harshly, shove at his ribs, and then settle into the space just over his shoulder, studying the way that Ichigo is studying the crown. Jointed.

 

"Wait," Grimmjow says, and turns to Starrk, "Yer the  _primera_. You try it."

 

Starrk figures that neither of them are careless enough to throw around an object holding the key to the entire realm.

 

He's inherently wrong.

 

Kurosaki nods, sagely, muttering,  _true enough_ , and shrugs as though it's not really his place to question, and lets Grimmjow pick the crown from where he's loosely grasping it. Sexta, of course, has never been obedient, nor has he ever particularly cared for following regulations. He chucks the crown at Starrk in all of its entirety, its prestige and nimbus. Starrk would yelp, except that, it's not something he does, and arches backward, out of its trajectory.

 

The crown stops, midair. As though this is something that happens. It bobs, contemplating, in the air just before him. He imagines that it considers him, frozen, surprised.

 

"Well -- there's that," Grimmjow says, and slouches down into the cracked throne. Ichigo frowns.

 

"That's it?" he skeptically says, "Your journey of self discovery ends with  _this_?"

 

"Oi," Grimmjow mutters, "Don't act like this was all my idea, Kurosaki."

 

"You didn't even point out me using  _"self discovery"._  Something  _is_  wrong with you," Ichigo says.

 

Grimmjow turns to face him, jaw cinched tight. "One more word, Shinigami -- " he warns.

 

Ichigo shrugs. He turns to Starrk. The crown remains still, almost as though it were hesitant. "Well?" he says.

 

"I've never desired to rule," Starrk says. A split frame negative. At the one end, there is something heavy and foreboding permeating the air. There is Sexta's back curving forward in his seat to lean into the space where Starrk and the crown are. But he is not a king. These two are, perhaps, not the most apt candidates either, but what's it to Starrk?

 

"What if you don't have to?" Ichigo says, and looks to Grimmjow. There is an instant in which they make eye contact, and Starrk wonders about the probabilities of interspecies' thought sharing. And then, quite frankly --  _what the hell?_

 

 

*

 

 

It isn't so much the situation that puts him at the wrong end of the spectrum.  _I've never desired to rule_ , Starrk thinks, and realizes that it's always this that is going to ring off kilter to himself when he thinks of it. It isn't that Sexta laughs, not unkind, and slings an arm carelessly about the circumference of Ichigo's shoulders, pulling him in and shoving him back out of his own orbit. That they go about each other -- Starrk, the crown of bone and marrow digging into his hairline, and the two of them, Grimmjow draping over the throne, Ichigo leaning into its side.

 

There isn't much to rule. Hueco Mundo's inhabited wasteland is now its barren miles of waste. There is nothing left. The scarcity of Hollows and spirits alike is palpable. Las Noches' perimeter is empty, and they are alone. Starrk doesn't really care about any of it -- he is grateful that less creatures will have to experience what it is to have been caught between the living and the dead.

 

 

He has left the wind curling around the tops of the towers for the balmy heat of the insides of the ruins, where he does nothing out of the ordinary. Where none of them do anything out of the ordinary. They exist, and so they live. Starrk is used to that -- but that the other two do, is surprising. And with a lack of other subjects to pursue, the oddity of the camaraderie between Sexta and the human leaves him coolly curious.

 

"You are -- for all intents and purposes, a child," Starrk notes, looking to Ichigo perch on a chunk of limestone when Grimmjow is not around on one high noon. He looks up. "Your point being -- ?"

 

"You have a family, do you not?"

 

Ichigo regards him. "Depends on your definition, I guess. But yeah, I do."

 

"What would your definition be, then?" Starrk says. The crown faintly itches, where the small of a cut femur digs into his temple.

 

"Well," Ichigo says, looking as if he ponders it, "I guess the Shinigami are one -- or was one, they're kinda hunting me down right now. And Shinji 'n the Vizards are one. Urahara, Yoruichi, Inoue and Chad, Ishida -- it's about perspective, you know?" He traces a foreign tongue into the sand. Loops of letters and punctuation marks. "They're all family, in one way or another."

 

Starrk is about to question him on leaving out a very vital group of people, but realizes that Ichigo knows what he meant. Knows, where he was treading to reach. He inclines his head. "You wish to see them left out of this," he says, not referring to any of the people he had mentioned by name. "Your human family."

 

The Vizard laughs. It is hollow, but true. "I'm not vacationing," he says. "This isn't for me."

 

_Family, is that what they were to each other?_

 

Starrk has never desired to rule, and perhaps he has that in common with the child sitting before him. Ichigo curves into himself like someone who has lived war, and has forgotten what it feels like to have lived outside of war. The quantum of war is a circle, and inside of its circle is suctioning sand, and Starrk knows that if you do not have a second half that is committed to pulling you out -- well, perhaps its new outcome is that you end up in a land made of only sand, populated by the dead. Neither of them ever cared for any of this, and yet, at the peculiar hands of fate --

 

"And Sexta?"

 

"Grimmjow? He's alright," Ichigo says, lips slanting. "He's family, too."

 

 _Family_ , Starrk tastes on his tongue.  _Lilynette?_  he wonders, privately. It echoes, empty, a thought straying from inception to waste. She does not reply. She never does.

 

 

*

 

 

On the seventh day, Starrk knows that something cosmic happens.

 

He remembers the Old Testament, though he was never much for the grand tales of religion. But on the seventh day, the clouds amass, dark, far from Las Noches, and a sandstorm whips up from virtually nothing. Hueco Mundo protects its own, puts jagged claws into the backs of hostility. An eye for an eye. And hostility comes.

 

Starrk understands, more than he sees, across the far distance. Grimmjow comes back with his hakama torn and blood drying above his left eyebrow. He's frowning, the cuts of his cheeks hardening. Planing out, predatory.

 

"They're comin'," Sexta says, turning to where Ichigo has risen from his spot by the throne. Ichigo frowns.

 

"Are you okay?" he asks.

 

Sexta snorts with grim laughter. "Those Shinigami bastards want to execute us, and yer askin' me about a cut eyebrow? I'm fine,  _Ich-i-go_."

 

Starrk sees Grimmjow unwillingly let the cut be inspected and wiped at, muttering halfheartedly at Ichigo under the width of his breath. He moves around Ichigo, used to the Vizard's body, moving about a circumference that is easy and familiar. Starrk has seen it, but never painted so real, and true, as when they're preparing for an ambush. Preparing for a siege, or a battle.

 

They were never like that. Lilynette scoffed at preparation. _"You wanna meditate, Starrk, sure. I'll go meet them. The sooner we're done, the sooner we can go back to not giving a damn," she said, and turned, about to spring from the rooftop. Their rooftop. And the solace of not being seen. Never noticed, or bothered._

_"Do you want this?" Starrk asked, and opened one eye to her downturned mouth and pensive brow. His other half. Him, for all intents and purposes. Yet a different part of him. But he would always know her answer._

_"Of course I don't, dumbass," she muttered, true enough, "I don't want it. I want it_ over with _."_

 

Grimmjow shakes Ichigo off after a while, pushing him at arm's length, and straightens his jacket. He looks to Starrk. Would he be able to do that? Brush away at the phantom limb of Lilynette -- gain something else to put there, replace the part of his heart that he'd lost?

 

"I dunno about you," Grimmjow says, and Starrk takes note of his downturned mouth, but bright, bright eyes, "But I ain't planning on dying. So, see ya later."

 

 _No_ , he thinks, he would never be able to replace something that made a half out a whole of him.

 

The crown digs into his brow. He imagines it slicing open his skin, revealing the part of his frontal lobe that handles executive action. He was never a born leader. Never raised to follow command, a commander or a soldier who extends the hand, and the one who accepts it. He sits on the utmost top of the world, and he doesn't look down. He looks to Lilynette, kicking at the clouds, dangling her plaits down the south side of the tower. He never wanted anything but to be with her. To be a part of _them_.

 

 _Grimmjow_ , Ichigo says, at some point, when they're having a conversation, _I'm not sure of why he does anything, but he went with me on this crazy thing, so I guess I owe him -- a lot._ He stops short of saying what Starrk hears. _I owe him my life._ It's what the Vizard would have liked to say. He realizes that the children of the world are idealists. That if it were so easy, if it were up to them -- it would be. Starrk would rule Hueco Mundo. Black, on a white sheef of paper.

 

 _Grimmjow? He's family_. Ichigo talks with conviction and a half smile. _If he goes, so do I._ He talks with conviction, and drops half of the smile that is reserved for the person who finishes his sentence with a thought very similar to the one that Ichigo is having himself.

 

Lilynette? Starrk's half smile is reserved for her. It will never be whole. But he thinks of sharing a throne room with a brash Arrancar youngster, and the half-human half-spirit abomination that would kill for him as a brother would. As a partner would. Starrk has never been able to interact with other beings without endangering them, and he has never desired to kill. And for the longest time, he makes a makeshift home out of a circular platform and the wind for its three dimensional walls. For a while, there is nothing but the howl of forces larger than himself.

 

Sexta has his Pantera unsheathed, and he stalks towards the grand entrance, half razed. He will go into battle for someone who, by birth and by nature, represents a natural threat.

 

"Sexta," Starrk says, and Grimmjow stops, briefly looking back. Ichigo has turned the corner around the entrance. The farther he gets without Grimmjow at his side, Starrk guesses, the calmer he will be. It is peculiar, and it scratches an itch in Starrk that he cannot quite place. This complete selflessness.

 

"What?" Grimmjow says.

 

Starrk hesitates. Lilynette would kick him in the shin, shove at his hip. _Don't chicken, Starrk_ , she'd spit, and roll her eyes, and say what he would have liked to say. He will have to do without her, now.

 

"Why are you going with him?" What is he to you?

 

Grimmjow frowns. It's only momentary, but it is there, and Starrk knows enough to see that at the heart of it, Sexta is made up of a thousand upon thousands of souls, and all of him that they encompass, for all that he is -- he is young. And brash. And pulsating. There is no definitive answer there, but there is an emotion -- something that in Starrk, will make him turn his head, look for his other half. Perhaps, in the cavity in his chest that is made by so many souls, it is impossible to count -- there is something. Still. A fragment that remains.

 

Grimmjow shrugs. "That idiot don't know how to differentiate between a moronic plan and a decent one. I'm just seein' to that he doesn't prematurely die."

 

Starrk nods. "See to that neither of you do," he says, to Sexta's back, already turned, whiplash quick, as though it were an admission to something he'd rather not show. Grimmjow waves over his shoulder.

 

On the seventh day, Starrk knows, that something cosmic happens. It is predated. The moon is milky white, and the wind whips up a sandstorm, and Starrk rules Hueco Mundo. He sits at the throne, each and every day, and watches when the sun does not go up, and when it does not go down. He watches a disjointed pair of souls prying at each other, and senses that perhaps --

 

He wishes for them to return. Starrk never desired to be anything but whole. So perhaps, he will settle for not being left alone with the echoes of predated rulers and the ghosts of kings and spirits. Perhaps he will settle for the company of the two of them.

 

* * *

 


End file.
